Visit a startup’s website, and you’ll eventually drift towards a few standard links, from About to Team to Contact. But among those options, appearing on almost every site, is one link that simply doesn’t belong with the rest: “Blog.” MORE

This is the first of several blog posts discussing pre-seed rounds. To ensure you receive the rest, subscribe here. In this post, I want to answer the question, “What are pre-seed rounds?” ” I’ll also address why they’ve become fairly common. MORE

The startup ecosystem is often full of hyperbole, which is perfectly understandable when you think about it. A population of founders, employees, investors, advisors, and others all aligned in trying to build large disruptive businesses is naturally prone to lofty, even over-the-top language. MORE

Whether an entrepreneur is raising a smaller (pre-)seed round entirely from individuals or she has a seed-stage or larger VC firm involved in (leading) the seed syndicate, it’s somewhere between necessary and optimal to have multiple individual angel investors involved. First and foremost, angels can provide capital. But secondly, the can play a strategic role in everything from optics (signaling “smart money” is involved to connections to tangible, operational help. MORE

The journey between an initial idea and actually shipping can be summed up with one word: agony. It’s agonizing because you care — a lot. It’s agonizing because you’re building from zero, and that can be daunting. It’s agonizing because of all the thinking and rethinking, talking to customers and talking to the team, debating and kicking and screaming. You bite and scratch and claw at everything until, mercifully, you’re ready to go live. MORE

Ellie Mirman was the first marketer hired by the CMO of HubSpot, the Boston-based marketing software startup that IPOed in 2014. Below, she shares lessons learned from the earliest days of marketing the company and how this has translated to her second startup role as VP of Marketing at Toast. MORE

Josh Porter is the founder of What to Wear Daily , a service that helps you prepare for your day. He is best-known as the creator of 52 Weeks of UX and was also head of UX at HubSpot, by way of being co-founder of Performable (acquired in 2011). MORE

note: In 2013, Rob Go published a flowchart articulating his VC decision making process. Below, we’ve updated that graphic with new information in order to stay current and provide more context and transparency around each node. MORE

What will the future hold? It’s a question every VC asks themselves and the entrepreneurs they invest in. Some conclude that certain sectors or technologies — like AI, blockchain, VR — will define the next decade. MORE

A little under a year ago, we hosted an event called Angel Bootcamp that was a primer for folks thinking about getting into angel investing. It was really helpful for the community, and it is something we’ll probably do again, although not every year. MORE

We at NextView Ventures invest exclusively in a startup’s seed-stage round , meaning that many if not most of our deals are made alongside individual angel investors. These angels, however, come in many different shapes and sizes. MORE

This post was originally published on the personal blog of NextView founding partner Lee Hower. Lee’s posts also appear regularly on View From Seed. Subscribe here for more. Most folks reading this will know that many startups were built in part with the help of venture capital. MORE

At NextView, we’ve never been higher on NYC tech. Today, we’re excited to launch the State of NYC Seed — a comprehensive report on the ecosystem, authored by our own Tim Devane. Since joining NextView, we’ve talked often and excitedly about the New York startup ecosystem. MORE

Going to business school and becoming a startup founder are often positioned as conflicting choices by the media and startup bloggers. Some go as far as stating, flat out, that MBAs don’t make for good founders. MORE

“As a seed-stage investor, should you pay up for team or traction?” ” I posed this question on Twitter in December and got a bunch of different opinions. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. Prices in the startup world are relatively high. MORE

Over the summer, based on feedback from our portfolio and the broader startup community, NextView created pre-formatted board deck templates for seed-stage startups — part of our Growth Guides series. Included in that deck was something that caught some folks by surprise. MORE

When we create new platform initiatives, our team tries to think about how we can be the most impactful with our portfolio companies. We don’t sit in a room and pontificate about what they need — we just ask. MORE

This is a guest post from Stephano Kim , former co-founder of Web 1.0 success story Blackboard and veteran entrepreneur who’s held several COO and president roles at various startups. Many startup CEOs hire COOs or launch companies with a co-founder carrying the title. MORE

I’ve been meaning to follow up on Rob’s post last month highlighting the competitor slide as the least informative in an investor pitch deck. I’d like to nominate another: the market size slide, which is usually dominated by graphics like these: As investors, we’re considering the total addressable market for a given product or service immediately upon hearing a vision for it: How many users and/or customers are there for this? MORE

Today, we are excited to re-release an updated Hitchhiker’s Guide to Boston Tech ! This guide is a living and breathing site, so we make a bit of a push to update it on an annual basis to keep things fresh. MORE

Editor’s note: Understanding how to divide founder equity at a startup can be tricky, even to the point of reaching emotional riffs between founders. Below, Lee Hower offers advice for approaching these equity discussions objectively and properly. MORE

VC evaluation of seed-stage startups can seem arbitrary or imitative at times. Internally, the scarcity of tangible business metrics – product usage or revenue multiples for example – can make an investment decision feel daunting. Presented with various unknowns from any one pitch, VCs often lack an existing information infrastructure to examine in forming an opinion. MORE

Editor’s note: Local tech media company BostInno (a division of the American City Business Journals) hosts an annual Boston State of Innovation conference. Leading up to the event, they published an article listing questions VCs never answer , as submitted by the community. MORE

Today we’re thrilled to re-launch our most popular resource ever: board deck templates for seed-stage startups. Last year, we released two different variations of the deck , both contained in the same resource. Since then, they’ve been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. Based on that reaction, we wanted to continue improving the product through both additional revs/design and continuing to evolve how we think about board meetings in the first place. You can get a copy of our “2.0” MORE

Recently, I’ve been mentally noting a few things that I observe VCs doing regularly that many entrepreneurs may not readily understand. Below are four that come to mind, but there are probably a dozen or so that are pretty interesting. Leave a comment below if you can think of any more. MORE

There’s been a lot of digital ink spilled around the various types of capital available to startups today. At NextView, for instance, one of our more popular posts centers on atypical seed rounds to know. Today, we wanted to share some basics of another source of capital: venture debt. MORE

Editor’s note: At a recent team meeting at NextView, we looked at the high number of startups we invested in which were pre-product at the time. The question arose: What is a seed VC’s process like when a company is pre-product? The below article answers that question. MORE

A few weeks ago, Manu Kumar wrote an excellent post detailing the current state of the seed financing landscape. Read it – it’s excellent. I agree with most of the things that Manu wrote, and I’ve been thinking about the topic quite a bit over the last several days. MORE

As a child, I believed logical arguments were enough to convince anyone of anything. You just needed enough time to explain them in painstaking, rational detail—others would listen and understand. As an adult, I know the world operates on story first and logic second. MORE

Nearly all of the guidance for meetings with VCs is centered on the very first meeting: how to get it, how to prepare a pitch deck , how to run the meeting , etc. But then the tactical advice stops. What about the rest of the VC fundraising process? MORE

If you’re in the tech startup industry today, you get the sense that every one of your peers wants to take on the entire world. Founders laud their own “end-to-end” thinking. Engineers and even marketers proudly claim to be “full stack.” MORE

As the seed-stage startup fundraise process has received more transparency in recent years, ranging from published advice on how to raise seed capital to increased availability through AngelList, Funders Club, and various accelerator programs, I’ve noticed another trend emerging. MORE

Today, NextView Ventures is excited to release a pillar project in our Growth Guides series: pitch deck templates for raising seed capital. These help address a common question which we frequently receive from entrepreneurs about how to create startup pitch decks for this crucial financial milestone. MORE

Once a startup has raised seed capital, plenty of theories and advice exist on how to successfully raise a Series A. Recently, we looked at our own portfolio at NextView Ventures to dig a little deeper on how startups actually raise that next round of financing. MORE

Oh what’s in a name? Your startup’s name and branding become objects that represent your passion, pride, and determination. But startups change their names more often than their founders or teams might like, despite all the love for their current incarnation. So … why? MORE

You probably know them well. If you’re not already subscribed to a number of them yourself, you’ve seen pop-up messages—on any number of sites—that urge, beg, plead with you to sign up to receive them regularly. MORE

View from Seed

When we create new platform initiatives, our team tries to think about how we can be the most impactful with our portfolio companies. We don’t sit in a room and pontificate about what they need — we just ask.

This is the first of several blog posts discussing pre-seed rounds. To ensure you receive the rest, subscribe here. In this post, I want to answer the question, “What are pre-seed rounds?” ” I’ll also address why they’ve become fairly common.

note: In 2013, Rob Go published a flowchart articulating his VC decision making process. Below, we’ve updated that graphic with new information in order to stay current and provide more context and transparency around each node.

Visit a startup’s website, and you’ll eventually drift towards a few standard links, from About to Team to Contact. But among those options, appearing on almost every site, is one link that simply doesn’t belong with the rest: “Blog.”

This post was originally published on the personal blog of NextView founding partner Lee Hower. Lee’s posts also appear regularly on View From Seed. Subscribe here for more. Most folks reading this will know that many startups were built in part with the help of venture capital.

As the seed-stage startup fundraise process has received more transparency in recent years, ranging from published advice on how to raise seed capital to increased availability through AngelList, Funders Club, and various accelerator programs, I’ve noticed another trend emerging.

This is a guest post from Stephano Kim , former co-founder of Web 1.0 success story Blackboard and veteran entrepreneur who’s held several COO and president roles at various startups. Many startup CEOs hire COOs or launch companies with a co-founder carrying the title.

What will the future hold? It’s a question every VC asks themselves and the entrepreneurs they invest in. Some conclude that certain sectors or technologies — like AI, blockchain, VR — will define the next decade.

Ellie Mirman was the first marketer hired by the CMO of HubSpot, the Boston-based marketing software startup that IPOed in 2014. Below, she shares lessons learned from the earliest days of marketing the company and how this has translated to her second startup role as VP of Marketing at Toast.

Josh Porter is the founder of What to Wear Daily , a service that helps you prepare for your day. He is best-known as the creator of 52 Weeks of UX and was also head of UX at HubSpot, by way of being co-founder of Performable (acquired in 2011).

Today, NextView Ventures is excited to release a pillar project in our Growth Guides series: pitch deck templates for raising seed capital. These help address a common question which we frequently receive from entrepreneurs about how to create startup pitch decks for this crucial financial milestone.

If you’re in the tech startup industry today, you get the sense that every one of your peers wants to take on the entire world. Founders laud their own “end-to-end” thinking. Engineers and even marketers proudly claim to be “full stack.”

VC evaluation of seed-stage startups can seem arbitrary or imitative at times. Internally, the scarcity of tangible business metrics – product usage or revenue multiples for example – can make an investment decision feel daunting. Presented with various unknowns from any one pitch, VCs often lack an existing information infrastructure to examine in forming an opinion.

As the seed-stage startup fundraise process has received more transparency in recent years, ranging from published advice on how to raise seed capital to increased availability through AngelList, Funders Club, and various accelerator programs, I’ve noticed another trend emerging.

This is a guest post from Stephano Kim , former co-founder of Web 1.0 success story Blackboard and veteran entrepreneur who’s held several COO and president roles at various startups. Many startup CEOs hire COOs or launch companies with a co-founder carrying the title.

What will the future hold? It’s a question every VC asks themselves and the entrepreneurs they invest in. Some conclude that certain sectors or technologies — like AI, blockchain, VR — will define the next decade.

At NextView, we’ve never been higher on NYC tech. Today, we’re excited to launch the State of NYC Seed — a comprehensive report on the ecosystem, authored by our own Tim Devane. Since joining NextView, we’ve talked often and excitedly about the New York startup ecosystem.

Nearly all of the guidance for meetings with VCs is centered on the very first meeting: how to get it, how to prepare a pitch deck , how to run the meeting , etc. But then the tactical advice stops. What about the rest of the VC fundraising process?

The startup ecosystem is often full of hyperbole, which is perfectly understandable when you think about it. A population of founders, employees, investors, advisors, and others all aligned in trying to build large disruptive businesses is naturally prone to lofty, even over-the-top language.

There’s been a lot of digital ink spilled around the various types of capital available to startups today. At NextView, for instance, one of our more popular posts centers on atypical seed rounds to know. Today, we wanted to share some basics of another source of capital: venture debt.

Going to business school and becoming a startup founder are often positioned as conflicting choices by the media and startup bloggers. Some go as far as stating, flat out, that MBAs don’t make for good founders.

Once a startup has raised seed capital, plenty of theories and advice exist on how to successfully raise a Series A. Recently, we looked at our own portfolio at NextView Ventures to dig a little deeper on how startups actually raise that next round of financing.

I’ve been meaning to follow up on Rob’s post last month highlighting the competitor slide as the least informative in an investor pitch deck. I’d like to nominate another: the market size slide, which is usually dominated by graphics like these: As investors, we’re considering the total addressable market for a given product or service immediately upon hearing a vision for it: How many users and/or customers are there for this?

Editor’s note: At a recent team meeting at NextView, we looked at the high number of startups we invested in which were pre-product at the time. The question arose: What is a seed VC’s process like when a company is pre-product? The below article answers that question.

A few weeks ago, Manu Kumar wrote an excellent post detailing the current state of the seed financing landscape. Read it – it’s excellent. I agree with most of the things that Manu wrote, and I’ve been thinking about the topic quite a bit over the last several days.

You probably know them well. If you’re not already subscribed to a number of them yourself, you’ve seen pop-up messages—on any number of sites—that urge, beg, plead with you to sign up to receive them regularly.

Editor’s note: Understanding how to divide founder equity at a startup can be tricky, even to the point of reaching emotional riffs between founders. Below, Lee Hower offers advice for approaching these equity discussions objectively and properly.

Whether an entrepreneur is raising a smaller (pre-)seed round entirely from individuals or she has a seed-stage or larger VC firm involved in (leading) the seed syndicate, it’s somewhere between necessary and optimal to have multiple individual angel investors involved. First and foremost, angels can provide capital. But secondly, the can play a strategic role in everything from optics (signaling “smart money” is involved to connections to tangible, operational help.

Today we’re thrilled to re-launch our most popular resource ever: board deck templates for seed-stage startups. Last year, we released two different variations of the deck , both contained in the same resource. Since then, they’ve been downloaded hundreds of thousands of times. Based on that reaction, we wanted to continue improving the product through both additional revs/design and continuing to evolve how we think about board meetings in the first place. You can get a copy of our “2.0”

Recently, I’ve been mentally noting a few things that I observe VCs doing regularly that many entrepreneurs may not readily understand. Below are four that come to mind, but there are probably a dozen or so that are pretty interesting. Leave a comment below if you can think of any more.

A little under a year ago, we hosted an event called Angel Bootcamp that was a primer for folks thinking about getting into angel investing. It was really helpful for the community, and it is something we’ll probably do again, although not every year.

We at NextView Ventures invest exclusively in a startup’s seed-stage round , meaning that many if not most of our deals are made alongside individual angel investors. These angels, however, come in many different shapes and sizes.

Today, we are excited to re-release an updated Hitchhiker’s Guide to Boston Tech ! This guide is a living and breathing site, so we make a bit of a push to update it on an annual basis to keep things fresh.

The journey between an initial idea and actually shipping can be summed up with one word: agony. It’s agonizing because you care — a lot. It’s agonizing because you’re building from zero, and that can be daunting. It’s agonizing because of all the thinking and rethinking, talking to customers and talking to the team, debating and kicking and screaming. You bite and scratch and claw at everything until, mercifully, you’re ready to go live.

“As a seed-stage investor, should you pay up for team or traction?” ” I posed this question on Twitter in December and got a bunch of different opinions. It’s something I’ve been thinking a lot about recently. Prices in the startup world are relatively high.

Oh what’s in a name? Your startup’s name and branding become objects that represent your passion, pride, and determination. But startups change their names more often than their founders or teams might like, despite all the love for their current incarnation. So … why?

Editor’s note: Local tech media company BostInno (a division of the American City Business Journals) hosts an annual Boston State of Innovation conference. Leading up to the event, they published an article listing questions VCs never answer , as submitted by the community.

Over the summer, based on feedback from our portfolio and the broader startup community, NextView created pre-formatted board deck templates for seed-stage startups — part of our Growth Guides series. Included in that deck was something that caught some folks by surprise.

As a child, I believed logical arguments were enough to convince anyone of anything. You just needed enough time to explain them in painstaking, rational detail—others would listen and understand. As an adult, I know the world operates on story first and logic second.